Slide 4 of 20
Notes:
My own projects have tried to join together three interrelated lines of research: 1) critical analyses of technical discourses and practices, 2) ethnographies of work and technologies-in-use and 3) design interventions. My concern throughout has been with reconstructing technologies as social practice, taking the term “reconstruction” in two senses. The first sense references the work of anthropology, particularly ethnographic studies. In this sense the question is how to conduct ethnographies of work and technology, including both practices of design and artifacts-in-use, that are aimed at recovering the projects, identities and interests that inform those practices. These reconstructions are about making sense of what’s currently in place. The second sense points to a more reformist agenda, aimed on the one hand at critical analyses of the professional practices and institutional arrangements of contemporary technology production, and on the other at possibilities for the development of alternative approaches. These reconstructions are about re-making what we have into something new.
